The ever-increasing sophistication of robots allows them to perform more and more human roles or tasks. Order fulfillment and inventory management is a field that has benefited from this increased robotic sophistication.
With respect to order fulfillment and inventory management, robots may traverse a warehouse or distribution site in order to retrieve different items for fulfillment of different customer orders. The robots identify a path to the locations of the different items, navigate the paths while avoiding collisions with humans and other robots, identify the totes or bins that contain multiple units of an ordered item from warehouse shelving, pull the identified totes, carry the totes back to a station where a human or other robot extracts the desired quantity of items from the totes before the robots return the totes back to the warehouse shelving. This is one example of a workflow that the robots can autonomously perform.
The robots depend on multiple sensors, actuators, motors, mechanical components, processors, and algorithms to complete these tasks. As robotic sophistication increases, the efficiency by which the robots can complete the tasks increases, thereby enabling each robot to complete more tasks in less time using the same sets of resources (e.g., sensors, motors, mechanical components, processors, and algorithms). As relating to order fulfillment, the increased efficiencies reduce the average time to retrieve each tote, which in turn, allows the same number of robots to fulfill more orders in the same amount of time, thereby reducing overall cost of the warehouse administrator.
One specific area where there is lack of sophistication is robot interaction. For the most part, robots operate independent of one another. Each robot sets about completing its set of assigned tasks without accounting for what other robots are doing. They use their sensors to detect and avoid colliding with one another when in physical proximity with one another, but they do not coordinate their operations with each other.
Thus, there is a need to shift the robots away from operating independently on a task-by-task basis. There is a need for the robots to better and more directly collaborate with one another, and to intelligently and dynamically account for actions taken by other robots regardless of where those robots are in the warehouse.
By addressing these needs, robot efficiency can be greatly increased. Redundant tasks performed by different robots at different times can be batched and performed at one time by one robot. The robots can simultaneously optimize the space in which they operate and the resource with which they operate such that that the resources they need to access are more frequently available and require less time to access.